Career Development - A Personal Case Study

Note that in previous blog posts, we expanded the scope of our analysis beyond the career portion of a person’s life to include those years between the end of a career and a complete lifetime.  And while some of those years may not be quite as golden as some greeting cards might suggest, they do represent a golden opportunity for individuals to burnish their lifetime legacies even further by making contributions to society and posterity well beyond those made during their working years.

A Personal Case Study

With this as background, we will now consider a personal case study in which the following elements were present: 1) a Haldane/Strong-inspired career direction; and 2) a rudimentary decision criterion.

In the summer of 1971, my Haldane Associates’ counselor helped me recognize that becoming a ‘public administrator’ at the university level would match my faculty credentials (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. in physics) with my personal interests—as demonstrated by my Strong Interest Inventory results.

Research at the time revealed that most university presidents tended to come from the tenured faculty who rose through the ranks from assistant professor, to associate professor, to full professor, to department chair, dean, provost, and then president.  Even back then, there were a few alternate routes to university presidencies, but more than 90% at that time followed the path just described.

Although I had earned my Ph.D. by age 30, and was pleased on a purely intellectual level with the career plan my Haldane counselor and I came up with, I certainly had doubts about whether I would ever really become a department chair or dean, much less a provost or university president.

But despite my doubts, the career development plan itself was very comforting to me because it laid out a career direction that I knew I would always be happy with since it would be well supported by both my faculty credentials and my personal interests.  So in that sense, I knew the career direction I had chosen would suit me well, even though I had no idea how far I might actually progress up the “career chain.”

A Rudimentary Decision Criterion

Although I have previously described and highly recommended two powerful decision criteria, such as Shirley’s Strategic Planning model and Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, neither of those two rubrics had been invented in 1971.  I learned about Shirley’s work in 1980 and Covey’s work in 1988.  So the only decision criterion I had available to me in 1971 was a very simple homegrown one that I figured out for myself.  And in what follows, I will describe how it worked for me and might also work for others. 

From Dream to Reality

At the start of the 1971-72 academic year—my second year of teaching in the physics department at Temple University after completing my doctoral studies there—I put my Haldane training to work exactly as I had been taught.  And by the end of that year, I actually had three solid job offers.  One was for a tenure track faculty position at Temple University, another was to become the Assistant Dean of the Ambler Campus of Temple University, and the third was for a tenure track assistant professor of physics position at Villanova University, my undergraduate alma mater.

One of my mentors at Temple University was George W. Johnson, dean of the college of Liberal Arts (which also included the Sciences at that time).  He later became president of George Mason University.  Dean Johnson offered to be my mentor after learning I had invented a course on the physics of sports. He said if I could explain a knuckle ball to him, he would become my mentor.  I did explain it to him and he did become my mentor.  And one of the first things he did as my mentor was to appoint me the executive secretary of the Goals Committee of the College of Liberal Arts.  There I had the opportunity to interact with and learn from the senior and most distinguished professors at Temple University at that time as they planned the future of the college of liberal arts five to ten years into the future.

Later, Dean Johnson received a recommendation from the physics department offering me a tenure track faculty position, but he advised me not to take it!  As a graduate of the department, he said, I would never be accepted by some of the professors and that, if I wanted to avoid being seen as the “kid” in the department, I should start fresh at another university.  So after nine years at Temple University, seven as a graduate student and two as an adjunct assistant professor, I took his advice, turned down the Temple faculty offer, and looked at my other two options.